If lifetimes and universes are analogous to schools, then the classrooms are stages of consciousness, pushing us to ever greater self-awareness and self-development — only if we are wise enough to pursue the path offered.

Thus our lives are complex creations, a series of “progressive awakenings,” advanced or retarded drop by drop, by our individual, family, racial, national and global karma.

Everyone, in this view, settles into his or her own unique rhythm in which a lifetime meditation reflects a mixture of past karma, and present choices.

We all must be then at slightly differing points on an ascending evolutionary arc, paying off old debts, making new ones — pushing forward or slipping back, and the mind thus ever awakens to newer realities.

Drop by Drop

The choices that shape our character each lifetime, are self-chosen—compounded of physical, sensory, emotional, mental, psychic and spiritual energies.

The ancient Egyptian after death judgement, weighed symbolically a person’s heart against the “feather of truth.”

The challenges of life, the occult doctrine notes, are the result of our being grounded in a personal level of consciousness, a limited world view. The Secret Doctrine 1:39-40 teaches that “whatever plane our consciousness may be acting in, both we and the things belonging to that plane are, for the time being, our only realities.”

Progressive Awakenings

“Nothing is permanent except the one hidden absolute existence which contains in itself the noumena of all realities.”

Weighing the Heart against the Feather of Truth

“Only when we shall have reached the absolute Consciousness, and blended our own with it, shall we be free from delusions.”

“As we rise in the scale of development we perceive that during the stages through which we have passed we mistook shadows for realities.

… and the upward progress of the Ego is a series of progressive awakenings, each advance bringing with it the idea that now, at last, we have reached ‘reality’—”

Dual Consciousness

“There are two kinds of Siddhis,” the Voice of the Silence insists — “one group embraces the lower, coarse, psychic and mental energies, the other exacts the highest training of Spiritual powers. Says Krishna in Śrîmad Bhâgavatam: — “He who is engaged in the performance of yoga, who has subdued his senses and who has concentrated his mind in me (Krishna), such yogis all the Siddhis stand ready to serve.”

Changes

“The great psychic and spiritual change now taking place in the realm of the human Soul,” wrote H. P. Blavatsky in The Tidal Wave, “is quite remarkable.” Yet this sea change “asserts itself,” Blavatsky wrote,

“…amid a loud din of busy, boisterous tongues,
a clash of public opinion.”

This signal event began towards the beginning of the last quarter of the 19th century, she wrote, “and will end — so says a mystic prophecy— either for the weal or the woe of civilized humanity.”

“But the great change is not effected in solemn silence, nor is it perceived only by the few,” she wrote. By comparison, the roar even of the noisiest political agitation seems like the rustling of the young forest foliage, on a warm spring day.”

The Awakening

“Verily the Spirit, so long hidden out of public sight, so carefully concealed and so far exiled from the arena of modern learning, has at last awakened.

“It now asserts itself and is loudly re-demanding its unrecognized yet ever legitimate rights. It refuses to be any longer trampled under the brutal foot of Materialism — speculated upon by the Churches — and made a fathomless source of income by those who have self-constituted themselves its universal custodians.”

Me Too (hashtag)

“The phrase had been used more than 200,000 times by October 15, 2017 and tweeted more than 500,000 times by October 16. On Facebook the hashtag had been used by more than 4.7 million people in 12 million posts during the first 24 hours. The platform reported that 45% of users in the United States had a friend who had posted using the term.”

The Awakening

So frequently turned by ignorance into a blind wanderer, deafened by the din and roar of civilization and culture, the Spirit in man has returned today like King Lear, from seeming insanity to its senses. “And the party which will win the day at this supreme hour will become the master of the situation and of the future.”

King Lear

“The age of crass materialism, of Soul insanity and blindness, is swiftly passing away,” Blavatsky wrote in her article The Tidal Wave:

“A death struggle between Mysticism and Materialism is no longer at hand, but is already raging.

“The Spirit in man—the direct ray of the Universal Spirit— has at last awakened. It will become the autocrat and sole disposer of the millions of men already born and to be born. If the signs of the times can be trusted it is not the materialists and atheists who will remain conquerors.”

“So frequently turned by ignorance into a blind wanderer, deafened by the din and roar of civilization and culture, the Spirit in man has returned today like King Lear, from seeming insanity to its senses. And the party which will win the day at this supreme hour will become the master of the situation and of the future.”

“Today, the need for spiritual explanations remains strong — some 20 percent of the population describes themselves as ‘spiritual, but not religious,’ that is, unaffiliated with a specific church or synagogue but engaged in spiritual seeking.”

According to a Pew Research Center survey conducted between April 25 and June 4 of this year (2017), about a quarter of U.S. adults (27%) now say they think of themselves as spiritual but not religious, up 8 percentage points in five years.”

The Atlantean Decline

“According to H. P. Blavatsky, black magic, or the misuse of spiritual powers, led to loss of spiritual vision by the end of the fourth (Atlantean) race, as well as the gradual disappearance of the third eye, until its functions, “owing to the materiality and depraved condition of mankind:

“‘…died out altogether before the submersion of the bulk of the Atlantean continent.’”

“The possession of a physical third eye, we are told,” Blavatsky wrote, “was enjoyed by the men of the Third Root-Race down to nearly the middle period of Third Sub-race of the Fourth Root-Race. [But], the consolidation and perfection of the human frame, made it disappear from the outward anatomy of man.”

The Final Chapter?

Even the Earth reincarnates. The final chapter of life on Earth, H. P. Blavatsky claimed in The Secret Doctrine 1:269, is still in draft form. Stay tuned.

“The History of Creation and of this world from its beginning up to the present time is composed of seven chapters. The seventh chapter is not yet written.”